US missionary's arrival still bodes ill for Africa

America's top trade official, Robert Zoellick, went to Africa last week to preach the new gospel. Free trade is good for your economies, he told representatives of 31 countries assembled in Mauritius to mark the second anniversary of the US African growth and opportunity act, a regional trade pact allowing them special access to America's markets.

Africa would "benefit greatly" from reducing or even eliminating subsidies and other barriers to trade, Mr Zoellick told the meeting.

Pity then, that the message doesn't seem to have got through to America's farmers - who received an 10% increase in subsidies last year - or for that matter the American steel industry, which George Bush protected from foreign competition with punitive tariffs on imports.

America may spend more subsidising the 25,000 farmers employed in its cotton industry than the gross national product of many sub-Saharan African countries, but Mr Zoellick doesn't let a few inconvenient facts get in the way of a good story.

The pact's story is supposed to be about how America is helping the desperately poor countries of Africa trade their way out of poverty. Rather than a missionary for free trade however, Mr Zoellick is more like one of the commercially minded explorers who carved up Africa for the great powers in the late 19th century. David Livingstone dreamed of commerce ridding the continent of poverty, but his successors came armed with one-sided treaties which kept the economies of Africa locked in unequal relationships with their new colonial masters.

"All over Africa, in those heady years of the scramble, the blank treaty form and the national flag had become part of the explorers' stock in trade, like their barter goods of Venetian beads and their bales of American cloth," writes Thomas Pakenham in The Scramble for Africa, describing how in 1885 the young German explorer, Carl Peters, claimed for Bismark the region that is now Tanzania.

In Mauritius last week, Tanzania became the latest country to sign up for the pact. Dar Es Salaam will now be able to export a limited range of textile goods to the US, duty free. But there's a catch - the bales of American cloth Pakenham writes about are still a feature of trade diplomacy. To maximise their zero tariff access, Tanzania's firms must make their goods from American fabric - if they use cotton from Africa there is a strict quota on how much of the market they can gain.

The IMF has estimated that by removing the rules of origin conditions, Washington could multiply the pact's benefits fivefold. But this is a trade policy designed for Lubbock County, Texas, not for Tanzania. The heart of America's subsidy-bloated cotton industry is Texas, and Mr Bush knows all about keeping the boys in Lubbock County happy.

To gain even this limited access, Tanzania and the 12 other participating countries have to give sweeping concessions to US investors and agree to strict patent laws which are likely to push up the prices of essential medicines.

The problem Tanzania faces is the same for any small economy negotiating with a large market. Even a tiny reduction in tariffs by the bigger player is worth it for the smaller player because of the size of prize. But to gain access, the concessions they must make at home are far larger. That's the real reason why so many poor countries are desperate to join the World Trade Organisation, even though they may be suspicious of its agenda. Only by clubbing together can they wield enough negotiating clout to redress the balance.

Alarmingly though, despite the west's promise to make the next round of a global trade talks a development round, the multilateral route appears to be running into the sand. Reducing agricultural subsidies will once again be the key to progress, but the stitch-up between Germany and France over the common agricultural policy has set back the chances of significant reform in Europe by almost a decade and given the US an excuse to keep its own equally wasteful system in place.

With progress at the WTO minimal, African countries have no choice but to sign regional and bilateral deals, no matter how unattractive. Future deals are likely to be even more heavily stacked against them. If the US, or for that matter Europe, were serious about making free trade work for Africa, they would start by liberalising agriculture and textiles. Don't expect that to feature when the next western negotiator comes to Africa to preach about free trade.